Then there was a strange rhyme about pulling fish out of one’s eye. Nursery rhymes are very weird and random. I just couldn’t find out what it was all about – was threescore and ten the years you might live? What are the fishes? Wishes? Golden riches? I had a vague memory that in a lecture once I had heard about fish being a symbol of remembering things – you’d hook a fish, but you wouldn’t pull up just one, because each fish would have another fish biting its tail, so you could pull out a great chain of fish. And in the days before google and books, remembering huge amounts of things was really useful.

But I still have the notes to the lecture (if was by Professor Bruce Brown) – and there’s no mention of memory fish.

2 thoughts on “Memory Fish”

Seems this is the Week for Finding Living Things In Body Parts Where They Don’t Belong. First 3-inch leeches hiding in a Scottish woman’s nose (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-29595164), now fishes in eyes. I don’t want to know what’s next.